Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, but she was to take a very different life path than her mercurial father. An obvious mathematical prodigy, Lovelace received training from another fantastic female nerd, Mary Somerville, who became her lifelong friend. Her biggest contribution to her field was the first computer program, written a century before the dawn of the computer age. Pretty impressive that she was down with hacking 150 years before it was cool.